Project Proposals for William Flynn Scholarship: IIndex page

Project Number: 8
Project Title: A Web-based Virtual Environment with voice activated interaction
Project Supervisor: Mr Ivan Crawford, Professor Paul Mc Kevitt

Virtual environments (VE) are computer-based representations of three-dimensional physical environments or abstract spaces. There is a wide range of practical uses for this technology in areas such as manufacturing, medicine and education.

In recent years there has been an exponential growth in the use of the Internet for recreational and business use. This increase in use of the Internet has led to demands for much more functionality than static web pages have been able to provide. In addition to demands for dynamic content, we have witnessed a growth in the use of multimedia over the web, with streaming audio and video becoming commonplace.

Virtual environments have been developed on "the web", mostly using Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), that allow for smooth navigation using primarily the mouse as input. Other environments have been developed that allow the use of textual scripts to direct navigation.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) refers to the way in which the meaning of a sentence, or similar, is broken down and understood. The elusive goal of NLP research is to define how this meaning is achieved and to describe this to a computer in order to teach machines something of how we, as humans, speak and understand each other. Speech recognition, a subset of NLP, refers to the manner in which a computer can audibly detect human speech, and translate that speech into a string of words, which it can then understand to be an actual command or response. It provides a new way to interact with computer, in a way that is easily understood by all types of users, by talking, instead of having to learn an unfamiliar interface.

There has been very little work on integrating spoken dialogue systems with VEs. The focus of this research is to develop a virtual reality environment that allows traditional inputs through mouse and/or keyboard for navigation and queries, but will also incorporate speech recognition and processing.

It is likely that there are a number of ways to achieve this, though it is likely that Extensible Markup Language (XML) will have a role to play, either as an interface between VRML and the natural language processing engine.

If you are interested in being considered for a studentship please contact
the Group Director, Professor T.M. McGinnity by email:
tm.mcginnity@ulst.ac.uk

or telephone: +44-(0)28-71375417.

See the current research section of this website for details on research projects pursued by existing PhD students